The first vegetable soup she’d made was solid, hearty, big chunks of potatoes, carrots and other root vegetables in the broth. Next she followed the instructions for cooking and canning a pureed corn soup and then an arrabiata sauce. Dune got twelve jars canned and was excited by how many things wouldn’t need refrigeration if she canned them properly.

It wasn’t until the third day of her food processing experiments that Dune realized she wasn’t just dabbling in disaster preparedness—she was preparing for the coming winter. It was obvious once she let herself think it.

She didn’t trust the city to get them through and she wasn’t going anywhere. She thought she could prepare enough food to get her and her grandmother through three months, maybe more. If Dune could make this food last through winter, they wouldn’t have to leave Detroit.

She went through Kama’s office files, which were really just all the flyers and print-outs anyone ever brought to any meeting in Detroit. Most of the paper meant nothing now, but Dune knew Kama had been part of the Food Justice Project and worked on a map of places where food had been grown and sold throughout the city. This copy of the map that Dune found was printed on a fragile piece of pale purple paper. Dune DIY-laminated it, layering clear packing tape edge over edge until this piece of survival gold was enclosed. It felt precious to her.

Kama had been a formidable advocate of gardens and fresh food and Dune knew that there was food all over the city. Everywhere she saw a cluster of carrots on the map meant there was a community garden. Many of them were behind fences, but fences meant less and less to Dune each day.

She learned that the little snowflakes meant cold storage when she came across a few cartons of potatoes in a subtle root cellar at a community garden a mile away. Within hours she’d brought the cartons home and processed them into future french fries and tall mason jars of potato soup, some with rosemary and garlic, others with leeks and celery. She stored the jars on the other side of the basement and took gallon bags of fries to the deep freezer in the shed.

The gardens were the priority. At the rate the city was emptying there wouldn’t be enough people left to take care of all that land. She wondered how much she could manage and if she could figure out what to do with all the food. The task felt impossible, which made her miss Kama, mother of all the plans and none of the fruition, who somehow excelled at the random and impossible task.

chapter eleven: Choosing to Stay